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Dr. Lupini, Members of the Brookline Foundation, School Committee Members, fellow staff members of The Brookline Public Schools, parents, students, family, and friends. On the day that Superintendent Lupini and Skye Kramer visited my Winthrop House classroom to inform me of this award, I remember telling them I felt both honored and humbled. These feelings have not changed; I remain awed by the honor bestowed upon me. But I want you to know I do not accept this award as an individual; I accept it as one member of a very large and efficient team. Every Brookline School employee, School Committee Member, volunteer, alumnus, parent, and student is a member of that team. And every member, whether directly or indirectly, has helped to support the work I do . . . the work we all do . . . as part of Brookline’s community of learning.
I also want to acknowledge two sub-teams I belong to within our community. First, the Special Education Department at Brookline High School. It has come to my attention that I am the first high school Special Education teacher to be presented this award, and so I accept it for the honor it brings to all of us in Special Education. To Fran Rogovin, my first BHS mentor; to Lindsay Murphy, who supervised my internship as I worked toward my Master’s Degree; to Cathy Heller, present Coordinator of Special Education at BHS; to Owen Minott, Coordinator of Winthrop House; and to the many skilled and compassionate colleagues with whom I have worked in Special Education, I say: this award belongs to all of you.
Since 1994, I have also been a member of the staff of Winthrop House. Many of you may be unfamiliar with our program because we are small and located not at the main high school, but off-site at the Baldwin School in Chestnut Hill. As my email resume says, Winthrop House is “a Brookline High School Special Education alternative program for creative and intelligent different drummers with learning and emotional disabilities.” I’d like to take this opportunity to say thank you, Owen, for your leadership and the ways you empower Winthrop House students, parents, and staff. And thank you, fellow members of the Winthrop House Team, for your consummate professionalism and unfailing support I want you to know I have never experienced such synergy as I experience daily through our collaborative efforts. This is what makes Winthrop House work so well, and so I accept this award for the honor it brings to our program.
And now, to the substance of what I want to share with you today. I’ve organized my speech around three key ideas: visions, gifts, and transitions. These three ideas represent what I have learned about teaching. Each, in its way, is what challenges me, energizes me, and keeps me grounded.
Vision
I began teaching in 1970 in Falmouth, MA at what was then called Lawrence High School. I was 22 years old, and I had to carry my red grade book in order to avoid being asked for a hall pass. On my very first parents’ night as a new teacher, I decided to share with parents my vision for their children. The evening went fairly well until the
last class, the remedial class. I used the same words in my presentation to those parents that I had used with parents in the other four classes. My vision, I told them, was to teach their children the difference between fact and opinion, to teach them to think critically and to help them articulate their own thoughts, feelings, and ideas, in speech and in writing. One of the fathers spoke up when I said this. “Young lady,” he said, “if you can teach them that, you’ll have taught them more than they’ve ever learned. My kid and his friends don’t have one logical idea in all their heads combined. Good luck.” And he laughed. I remember recovering and going on, but feeling my vision had been stepped on. That father’s reaction had me second-guessing myself. Was my vision too lofty? Unrealistic? Impossible? At that time, English classes were typically tracked, purportedly reflecting students’ ability levels. Would my vision work only with honors and college prep classes, not with general and remedial classes? I wouldn’t believe that, and so the next day told all my classes about the vision I had shared with their parents. I didn’t tell them about the father who had laughed; instead I told them how much I believed in them, and how certain I was that they could become readers and writers extraordinaire. As I remember it, some students seemed to perk up when I shared this vision, but others looked as bored as ever. It was my first year teaching. I was green, inexperienced, idealistic. I believed in my vision then, and I believe in it today. But mostly what I believe in is the importance of helping my students to develop their own visions, visions of who they are and who they can be. To believe in their own worth and to reach for the stars. OK. So I’m idealistic. Still. But over the years, idealism has paid off.
I only taught in Falmouth for one year. One day, seven years after that year, there was a knock on my door. Outside stood a young woman dressed in a Marine Corps Uniform. She looked vaguely familiar. “It’s Louanne,” she said, “Remember me?” And there she was, Louanne Mederios, all 4 ft 11 inches of her, standing on my porch. Louanne from the remedial class. She had tracked me down, she said, to thank me. “You gave me the first ‘A’ I ever got in school,” she told me, “you convinced me to keep writing poetry. You made me believe I could be somebody. And now I am, and I wanted to show you.”
In the teaching profession, we do not often get the chance to see the long-term results of the work we do. Only once in a while do we find out much about the way things are going for our students as adults. And when we do find out, and things are going well, it truly is a gift.
Gifts
One of the greatest gifts an educator can receive is the opportunity to learn . . . from colleagues, from students, and from parents.
I try never to forget a lesson I learned from the very first administrator who hired me. He told me to keep my expectations high, but to remember, as parents do, that older students are still children and need to be treated with understanding. It wasn’t until I had a child of my own that this message really hit home: every student, even the most difficult, is someone’s child, and every child deserves the same attention and understanding I would give my own.
When I asked my husband, who is also a teacher, what he thought I should say in this speech, he reminded me of advice I once gave him when he was dealing with an especially forceful set of parents. I told him to remember those parents were just
loving their child and wanting the best for her. I must have looked disappointed when he told me this because I recall thinking, “That’s what I said that stuck with you?” I was of course wishing I had said something a bit more profound. But then I decided his suggestion had led me to another gift I want to acknowledge today: the gift of working with Brookline parents, parents who are unusually devoted to the education of their children. This is one of the very best things about working in Brookline, and I know many of you in this audience agree with me.
And then there are the gifts I receive, the things I learn, from my students. They teach me about the learning challenges they face as together we work out ways to cope with those challenges. I remember one student, I’ll call him Sharquan, though that was not his real name, whose iep said he was intelligent, but slow to process information. No matter how patient I thought I was being, or what question I asked him, Sharquan never seemed to have answers about what we were studying. One day my attention was diverted by the needs of another student just as I asked Sharquan a question. When I finally got back to him, he was smiling. “I know the answer,” he said. And he did. “You know,” he continued, still smiling, “when I have enough time to think, I can usually get the right answer, but in most classes things seem to move so fast I can never keep up. Somebody else is always giving the answer before I even have a chance to raise my hand.” Bingo! He had just taught me, shown me as no text book ever could, how slow a student’s processing speed can be. That day I learned to slow down considerably when I worked with Sharquan and with other students like him; moreover, he had given me valuable information about the way he learned, information I could pass on to his other teachers.
Students teach me many things. They once made me a dictionary of street language and slang expressions I didn’t know. They fill me in on the ways things are done at Brookline High School. They teach me about their various ethnic and religious backgrounds.
The true gifts in teaching are the things we learn every day. School days are rarely dull, and we can never be quite sure what each new day will bring . . . except, perhaps, that each new day brings changes.
Transitions
I want to tell you what I have learned, in Special Education about why some students have such difficulty with changes, with the many transitions each of us must face.
Let me start with an analogy I’ve borrowed, and adapted, from a man with whose work some of you are no doubt familiar: renowned educator Rick Lavoie. Imagine, as Mr. Lavoie asks us to do, that every child is born into this world with a wealth of poker chips . . . a stash of thousands! A wonderful stash of potential self esteem. Depending on childhood experiences, the worth of the child’s stash of chips is fluid, depleting a bit or growing a bit according to what happens to the child each day, and depending on how he processes what happens.
Now imagine the child whose mother wakes him up lovingly, makes him a wonderful breakfast, and sends him off to school with a kiss and a smile. Ten thousand
poker chips! But if that same child is dealing with an already depleted stash of chips, and has few chips to lose, when he steps onto the bus, and an unthinking peer yells, “Hey,
Weirdo!” those ten thousand chips from Mom disappear, and then some. And when the child reaches school, is it any wonder he has trouble concentrating, trouble learning? Whatever the reason, though often the reason is a physical, social, cognitive, or emotional disability, the child with low self esteem is going to have difficulty getting through his or her day. Difficulty because he feels as though somehow he, or his life experiences, do not measure up to expectations. Difficulty because she is discouraged, sad, perhaps feels overwhelmed. These feelings make the most common every day transitions difficult, and on top of that, these feelings can block a child’s access to his innate intelligence. Each of the Winthrop House students I‘ve had the privilege of teaching over the years has, for reasons as individual as each student him or herself, experienced such blocks. Each teacher in this audience today has taught children who have experienced such blocks. When a class is a large class, too large to offer a child the extra attention he may need . . . and most public school classes are necessarily too large to allow that degree of individual attention . . .. that’s when the Special Educator is called upon. In a nutshell, the job of the Special Educator is to help challenged students not only hold onto their stash of poker chips, but also learn how to earn more; how to gain access to their abilities so each, in his own way, and in his own time, can learn, can cope with whatever is blocking access to his intelligence, and regain self-esteem. The rather bittersweet thing about the job we all have as educators is that like parents, we are always preparing our students to leave us, to learn to deal with transitions, and eventually to become independent of us.
I want to leave you with one last thought. As a Special Educator, I feel I have been awarded a luxury every day . . . the luxury of time. In my small classes, I can afford the time to forge a connection with every student; in my small classes, I can pace instruction to allow for a student’s bad days, and to capitalize on a student’s good days. But perhaps the best part of all, the best gift I am given every day, is my students themselves. I deal with some of the most courageous people I have ever met. With students who persevere every day in spite of the difficulties they face, and with parents who stand by their children, no matter how rough the road, or how weary their parenting makes them. My students learn to hold their heads high and to face what life deals out, often with smiles that brighten my day. So while I am grateful for this award, and I truly am, I want you to know . . . I already feel well rewarded every single day. Thank you. |
